English: Understanding Distributed Systems with OpenTelemetry - Austin Parker & Liz Fong-Jones

Presented by: Austin Parker, LightStep & Liz Fong-Jones, Honeycomb Presented at All Things Open 2020 - Extended Sessions Tracks

Abstract: Microservices have broken monitoring tools and practices. Traditional methods of application logging and host-based metrics can’t provide accurate and timely signals for issues impacting production. OpenTelemetry solves this dilemma by providing a single set of APIs, SDKs, and automatic instrumentation tools that give you the ability to understand your distributed system and the performance of individual services within it.

In this workshop, you’ll learn about the history and theory behind OpenTelemetry and why it’s essential to developing and deploying modern software. We’ll learn by doing, taking an existing microservices application and instrumenting it for observability using the many tools OpenTelemetry provides. We’ll use open source tools, like Jaeger and Prometheus, to ingest this telemetry data and show how you can analyze it in order to understand the performance of the application and identify performance regressions in your software.

You’ll walk away from this workshop with an understanding of how OpenTelemetry works, how it benefits you, and how you can quickly instrument your own software for observability.